Friday, April 2, 2010

The Color Without A Name

It's the secret agent of colors: complex, discreet and completely ambiguous. You've seen it many times but may have never quite registered it because it defies categorizing. It's not gray or blue or green, but a strange and mystifying combination of all three. It changes color depending on the light and the hues which surround it. It can appear slightly sulky, calm and relaxing, or intensely introspective.

Note: It's not greige. Greige is grey meets beige and this color is much more layered than that. And it's not eau de nil or chalk or grey threadbare velvet (although that's getting closer). But I know it when I see it. I am always searching, searching for it and when I find an example, I collect it carefully into a special folder titled "Color X."

Here it is, atmospheric and ethereal, in this ocean on a cloudy day.

(T. F. Simon, "Windy Beach on Normandy", 1924)

Here, Otto Dix painted himself in a suit of it. Understated and subtle, it nevertheless calls attention to itself in an elegant way.

("To Beauty", 1922)

It makes a beautiful counterpoint against warm, pink skin, as seen in this interior.

(Pierre Bonnard, "La Sieste", c. 1899)

At other times, it gives off an air of unapproachable sangfroid.

(George Grosz, "Remember Uncle August", 1919)

Here, Christopher Baily of Burberry covered a favorite chair in a floral pattern that incorporates bits of it. The peachy background really makes it sing.

My eyes hunt for it constantly. Once you have it in your brain, it's remarkable how often you can find it. Can you spot it here, in this photo of the Queen meeting Sir David Bailey? (It's on the strip of flocked wallpaper between them.)

41 comments:

I love how you incorporate so much art into your posts. The shade takes on a different hue depending on the light, the surrounding color palette, etc. There are some with a more blue, yellow, or green undertone!

To me it is a weather colour. The sky on the morning of the D Day landings, or on an icy winter's day in that moment just before the sun rises or as reflected darkly on some ice over a lake in turn of the century St Petersburg just before the sun sets and just after the skaters have finished for the day.

A very hard colour to wear as tea gown or anything else! You would need that porcelain, red hair colouring to make it work.

Ahhhhh... I am very familiar with this color. It's a coastal color- one that I recognize from many long walks along Maine beaches.Last summer we were at The Portland Museum of Art. There was one painting there that captured this color brilliantly with rolling surf. I didn't jot down the artist's name and poke myself at least once every couple of weeks for not doing so. Isn't it lovely~ this non-color? {Undertow}

I get that color sometimes by using a german green umber from Kremer Pigmente, and adding white. Or I mix black, yellow and white together, or I use Winsor newton's olive green with various additions. Its one of my favorite colors, but I don't have a name for it. Bog greige perhaps. Or Hurricane clouds, since I once saw clouds this color in St. Louis and that's what followed.

Ok, I'll play along because this is a color I look for and paint often:"before the mustard blooms sky" for now cause I live in Napa."above the sugar cane" for when I lived on Oahu and"homecoming season" for when I lived on an island in Seattle in September

I too love this colour and all our paintwork upstairs is light blue by Farrow and ball, teamed with Teresa's green in the bathroom for the full on effect.It also the colour of a Lichen that grows on the trees here so I would call it "Irish Lichen"

My family calls this "Mickey" color....simply because we had a Weimaraner dog named Mickey that was this color. We loved this color so much my mom had her home decorated using this color often.It's classy. But I'm still going with "Mickey" color. Not quite as poetic...but rather sentimental.

I had a friend who both like to cook and restore old cars. He had a car he had been working on for years and was finally approaching paint color decision time. He attempted to describe his vision: not gray, not brown, kinda in between and then the genius moment: you know the color on the back side of a hershey's bar that's been in the cabinet too long (he went on to tell me that condition was known as "bloom"). Makes me smile everything I see it.

Such a lovely color...we just painted samples of B.Moore's Revere Pewter and Edgecomb Gray. Both had that glowing quality about them that you just can't wrap your eyes around to figure out if they are gray, yellowish/greenish or blueish with a tinge of haze.

This color shows up quite a bit in paintings done by many of the Dutch Masters such as Vermeer and Joos de Mompar II, especially when the scene is out of doors.

It is a satisfying color because it is a warm grey. So many greys are cool. It is the grey that you see in clouds, where all of the colors in the color wheel are actually present, but in varying intensities, due to the angle of the sun.

gamblin oil color every year puts out a "color" they call "torit grey". it made from all the powdered pigment stuck in the air filters, which they clean out and make into paint rather than waste it. every year it's a slightly different color.and it's a wonderful paint for just this effect. it's all colors together and no color at all.

I feel a surge of warmth for this color no matter what it is called. It is evocative in a way that is rather uncommon in color and so many comments here reflect that feeling at seeing the complexity of it on the feathers of a dove, for example, or the aging shutters of a farmhouse. I, too, feel an intrinsic pull and connection with the sky and sea that the "Windy Beach on Normandy" so eloquently illustrates.

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